Alex La Guma lived in South Africa for the first forty years of his life.  From 1962-66 he was kept under house arrest for his writings and eventually forced to leave the country.  The London Times has compared his intense and somber vision to Dostoevsky.  His work was banned in South Africa.  This novel deals with a small community in South Africa moving inexorably towards tragedy.

Time of the Butcherbird

LA Guma, Alex

Literature & Fiction

Heinemann Educational

In The Fog of the Season's End

Heinemann

Hlangeni's people must be moved to a Bantustan from the land near an arid town in the South African Karoo for the benefit of mining interests. No other South African writer has given such a rounded picture of all the people in a small community inexorably moving towards tragedy.

Literary

This is the story of those people who daily risked their lives in the underground movement against apartheid. This novel is purposely low key. This was what happened every day. This was the grind of political organization. This was the day-to-day work of dedicated people. Only at moments of crisis where their dying bodies flashed up on the television screens.

In the Fog of the Seasons' End

Genre Fiction

Apartheid: A Collection of Writings on South African Racism by South Africans

Politics & Social Sciences

Sociology

Intl Pub

Of French and Malagasy stock, involved in South African politics from an early age, Alex La Guma was arrested for treason with 155 others in 1956 and finally acquitted in 1960. During the State of Emergency following the Sharpeville massacre he was detained for five months. Continuing to write, he endured house arrest and solitary confinement. La Guma left South Africa as a refugee in 1966 and lived in exile in London and Havana. He died in 1986. A Walk in the Night and Other Stories reveals La Guma as one of the most important African writers of his time. These works reveal the plight of non-whites in apartheid South Africa, laying bare the lives of the poor and the outcasts who filled the ghettoes and shantytowns.

A Walk in the Night and Other Stories

Northwestern University Press

Product Description One of South Africa’s best-known writers during the apartheid era, Alex La Guma was a lifelong activist and a member of the South African Communist Party and the African National Congress. Persecuted and imprisoned by the South African regime in the 1950s and 60s, La Guma went into exile in the United Kingdom with his wife and children in 1966, eventually serving as the ANC’s diplomatic representative for Latin America and the Caribbean in Cuba. Culture and Liberation captures a different dimension of his long writing career by collecting his political journalism, literary criticism, and other short pieces published while he was in exile. This volume spans La Guma’s political and literary life in exile through accounts of his travels to Algeria, Lebanon, Vietnam, Soviet Central Asia, and elsewhere, along with his critical assessments of Paul Robeson, Nadine Gordimer, Maxim Gorky, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and Pablo Neruda, among other writers. The first dedicated collection of La Guma’s exile writing, Culture and Liberation restores an overlooked dimension of his life and work, while opening a window on a wider world of cultural and political struggles in Africa, Asia, and Latin America during the second half of the twentieth century. About the Author Alex La Guma (1925–1985) was a South African novelist and leader of the South African Coloured People’s Organisation (SACPO). Several of his books were published in the famed African Writers Series edited by Chinua Achebe, including A Walk in the Night, In the Fog of the Seasons’ End, and Time of the Butcherbird.Christopher J. Lee is associate professor of history at Lafayette College, in Pennsylvania. He is the author of several books, including Jet Lag and Frantz Fanon: Toward a Revolutionary Humanism.Albie Sachs is an activist and a former judge on the Constitutional Court of South Africa. After having his arm blown off by a car-bomb in Mozambique in 1988 due to his opposition to apartheid, he fled to the US, but later returned to South Africa. He currently resides in Cape Town.Bill Nasson is professor of history at the University of Stellenbosch and is one of South Africa’s leading historians. In 2011 he won the Recht Malan Prize for Best Non-Fiction for The War for South Africa: The Anglo-Boer War 1899–1902, which was also shortlisted for the Alan Paton Award.

Culture and Liberation: Exile Writings, 1966–1985 (The Africa List)

History & Criticism

Seagull Books

This is the story of those people who daily risked their lives in the underground movement against apartheid. This novel is purposely low key. This was what happened every day. This was the grind of political organization. This was the day-to-day work of dedicated people. Only at moments of crisis where their dying bodies flashed up on the television screens.

In the Fog of the Seasons' End; A Novel.

Third Pr Review of Books

In the Fog of the Seasons End

And a threefold cord

Kliptown

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